One of the many films to premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Japanese writer/director Shunji Iwai’s Vampire which stars Kevin Zegers, Amanda Plummer, Adelaide Clemens, Rachael Leigh Cook, Kristen Kreuk, Trevor Morgan and Keisha Castle-Hughes. Here’s what the Sundance website has on the film:

Simon seems like a fairly normal, average young man who’s devoted to his teaching job and ailing mother. Underneath the surface, however, things are not what they seem. Simon hunts through online chat rooms and message boards, searching for the perfect girl: beautiful, shy, and suicidal. Simon has a particular condition: he is compelled to drink blood.

Anyway, the other day I got to interview Rachael Leigh Cook and Adelaide Clemens about working on Vampire here at Sundance. They talk about how Vampire is different from the Twilight films, their characters and the freedom that director Shunji Iwai gave them on set, the language barrier, upcoming projects, and a lot more. Hit the jump to watch:

:25 – Talk about the plot of the movie, how it’s very different from Twilight and all the other vampire-craze things out there. Say it’s more a realistic sense of what it would be like to be a vampire

2:38 – Talk about their characters and the freedom that the director gave them. Talk about being on a set where 80% of the people are speaking Japanese. Improvised a lot.

4:35 – Talk about working with director Shunji Iwai and his “poetic” way of communicating.

6:10 – Talk about the language barrier and the similarities between their experience and Bill Murray’s infomercial scene in Lost in Translation. Say that Iwai spoke in English a lot of the time, but there were also translators on set.

7:53 – Talk about the current vampire craze. How the mythology of vampires is becoming muddled and changed. Say Vampire is reactionary to the things going on right now. Talk about how it seems like every fifteen years or so people become obsessed with vampires.

10:09 – Cook talks about a pilot she just shot for TNT called Perception, in which she plays an FBI agent. Eric McCormack also stars.

10:38 – Cook talks about all of her roles on Robot Chicken

11:26 – Clemens talks about working on Generation Um… with Keanu Reeves. The film chronicles a day in the life of three “messed up” people.

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